Test Lab v2 – the Planning Stage

Before getting into the actual planning let me describe the environment and restrictions.

Hardware

Dell 2950 w/ 2 Xeon 3GHz CPUs, 32 GB RAM, 12 TB JBOD Direct attached

Software

Windows 2012 R2 (full install), Hyper-V role, with Windows Deduplication running on the JBOD to keep file sizes on VHDs down. The license is through our company MSDN account, permissible as this is for testing and development.

Powershell v5 is installed

Network

Dual gigabit ethernet adapters connected to the company LAN.

Restrictions

As a “guest” on the company network, I have to be very careful to isolate traffic in and out of my test environment. I’ll use a Vyos VM Router to do this.

I have no System Center VMM, no VMware, just plain vanilla out of the box Windows.

Alright so with our tools laid out, let’s talk about goals. What do I want to do be able to develop and test on this box? What’s that going to take? I’ve got to keep this simple or I’ll go down a rabbit hole of setting up the setup of the environment so that in the end I’ll get bogged down in minutiae. That may come later but for now – simple wins over cool new stuff.

Goal 1 : Learning to work in more of a DevOps kind of environment with source control and a development pipeline for my Powershell based tools. For this we’ll need TWO Virtual subnets – one for Dev and one for Test. Since there will only be one or two people on this at a time, I can build this all on the same box for now. Later when this process becomes more mainstream it won’t be difficult to rebuild the infrastructure on a production box.

Goal 2: build as much as possible with DSC – within reason. This is that rabbit hole I mentioned above. True you can build out a full network from scratch with DSC and a server WIM, but I’ve never done that and in the interest of getting stuff running right now I’m going a more old school route. Build a “Base” server in each subnet that is a multifunction server. It’ll be a domain controller, with DHCP, DNS, Windows Deployment Services and a DSC Pull server. From THERE I can work on things that I’m either rusty or inexperienced on. Walk before run before fly and all that good jazz.

I might add a goal 3 later but for now this is good. Let’s diagram this out so we can get that big picture over view.